Channels that take advantage of the MySXM feature let users adjust sliders to impact library depth, familiarity, music style, tempo, region, and over attributes. Eventually, more channels will get the feature.

SiriusXM President and Chief Content Officer, Scott Greenstein, says, “MySXM is a personalization feature built to enhance our already well-loved curated commercial-free music and comedy channels and make an already amazing listening experience even more personal. Our experts set the stage giving you the tools to make the channel your own. You decide how involved you want to get and where you want to take your channel.”

The idea is that you will hear more of the stuff you like and less of the stuff you don’t.

MySXM is a free feature for subscribers, and is included on the iOS and Android apps.

Today, many people think about Google as a search engine, with YouTube as a separate site for videos, Google+ as a social networking destination, Google Docs/Drive as a product for creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations, Picasa Web Albums as a place to keep photos, Gmail as a place for email, etc. It makes sense. Each of these products have specific things they do. However, Google doesn’t want you to necessarily think of these things as separate products. They want you to think of them as useful features of Google. One big, great Google experience that can meet all of your online needs.

Privacy, Integration and Personalization

Earlier this year, Google made significant changes to its privacy policies, essentially consolidating them into one main one for this very purpose – so they can use your data across products. It just so happens that these changes are currently under fire for European authorities, but they have already been implemented, and it remains to be seen whether Google will make changes to appease the EU.

With the new field trial, not only can you access Gmail, Google Drive and Google Calendar content from web search results, you can do so from Gmail results. Google is not only unifying its products, it’s unifying the search experience to some extent. How long before you can access content from any of Google’s products from the search box on another of its products. How long before you can find YouTube videos from a Google Docs search or Google+ results from a YouTube search? Picasa Web Albums content from a Gmail search?

Google has made other changes over the last couple weeks that fit into this line of thinking. For example, Google is now letting you see user reviews of local businesses from people’s Google Profiles. Google launched a familiar navigation system on its mobile homepage, reflecting the desktop version, which easily gets users to various Google products, as if they were simply features of Google.

Meanwhile, Google is already finding ways to improve search features of its various products. In recent months, we’ve seen Google launch updates to Gmail search. Just this week, Google made one to Google Drive search, enabling you to access menu functionality right from the search box.

While Google continues to integrate its various products with one another, it also continues to shut down numerous services. In some cases, these products just go away. In others, certain key functionalities go on to appear in other existing Google products. As giant as Google is, it has been slimming down and becoming more simplified little by little ever since Larry Page took over as CEO.

The Filter Bubble

The side effects of all of this simplification and integration are interesting. Alternative search engine DuckDuckGo highlighted one of them in a new video. That would be the “filter bubble“. Google, with its ability to use your data from product to product, is finding more ways to personalize your search experience. This new Gmail/Google Drive integration into web search results is a prime example. You’re seeing more content that is specific to you. Nobody else will get these search results.

DuckDuckGo’s whole point is that by personalizing the search experience to each user, Google is limiting access to information outside of this personalized bubble. You may never see results that other people are seeing, which could bring new perspective to whatever it is that you are searching for. They make the specific point of mentioning politically charged queries. The thinking is that you’ll never see the opposing viewpoints if you keep seeing results tailored to your existing biases.

Competition

There are three major themes that continue to dominate the conversation around Google’s strategy, and they’re all directly related: personalization, privacy and competition. The personalization (at least to some degree) is directly affected by the privacy policy, which is needed for Google to better compete against its rivals. Google has flat out said as much.

“Users are accustomed to their products working together, and expect this consistent experience across their Google Account,” the company wrote in a letter to the French data protection authority, the CNIL, which is leading the EU’s assault on Google’s privacy policy. “The use of a primary privacy policy that covers many products and enables the sharing of data between them is an industry standard approach adopted by companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo! and Apple.”

These, in addition to Amazon, are Google’s chief rivals. Meanwhile, these rivals continue to make moves that position them to better compete with Google. Interestingly enough, this is all shaking out at a time when Google faces antitrust battles with the EU and the FTC. Any regulation that may arise from these could severely hinder Google’s progress in the unification of its features at a time when such unification is at its most critical from a competitive standpoint.

Two of those competitors – Apple and Yahoo – just made significant hires that should enable them to compete at an even higher level against Google. Apple just got a major search player to lead its Siri unit, and Yahoo, now run by an historically critical Googler – Marissa Mayer – just took away Google’s President of Media, Mobile and Platforms Worldwide (not to mention other Googlers she’s managed to lure away in her short time at the company). How many more Googlers will follow Mayer over to Yahoo, which has been competing with Google since Google was launched?

While all this is going on, Facebook, which has also managed to poach a number of Googlers of its own, is working on a search product (led by a former Googler of course).

Colorado congressman Jarid Polis, a tech entrepreneur himself, has come out against any antitrust regulation of Google. In a letter to the FTC, he wrote, “While Google is surely a big company and an important service in people’s lives, my constituents also use a variety of competing services, including Amazon.com for shopping, iTunes for music and movies, Facebook for social networking and recommendations, and mobile apps like Yelp for finding local businesses. Competition is only a click away and there are no barriers to competition; if I created a better search algorithm I could set up a server in my garage and compete globally with Google. To even discuss applying anti-trust in this kind of hyper-competitive environment defies all logic and the very underpinnings of anti-trust law itself.”

He’s absolutely right about being able to start his own search engine if he wanted to. DuckDuckGo has done it, and from what I understand, has managed to gain a modest user base in a space many felt it was impossible to penetrate. It’s not a major player in search, but it’s a player nonetheless, and people can use it if they want. Some do.

It’s not these smaller players that Google must contend with, however. At least not for the foreseeable future. It’s the big players that both Google and Polis mentioned – the players like Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Yahoo. The players that have a lot of money to throw around on new products and services, as well as marketing. Antitrust and even privacy policy restrictions placed on Google could disrupt Google’s ability to make changes it needs to make to stay relevant and compete with these other giants (Facebook, by the way, is the top global brand, according to a new report from General Sentiment). Apple products, in case you haven’t heard, are pretty popular too. Especially the mobile ones (where Facebook use happens to be growing like a weed, not to mention that increased integration with Facebook that Apple’s mobile operating system has introduced with its latest update – an update that also reduced user exposure to Google through its Maps offering).

The point is, that as hard as it is to imagine Google going away, other companies have been on top in the past, and have slid down considerably. Microsoft was obviously dealt a huge blow by antitrust regulation years ago, which some would say it has still not fully recovered from. As Polis said in his letter, “Several years ago, we called firms like AOL, MySpace and Yahoo ‘dominant’ — but those firms have struggled to retain consumers online. Given how easily consumers can switch to a new service with just one click, regulators should be wary of intervening in the tremendous competition online.”

For all of the outcry from competitors over Google’s business practices, and the scrutiny from authorities, it’s stil not clear how much consumers actually believe they are being hurt by Google’s dominance on the Internet, or by their recently updated privacy policy. Personalization? The jury’s still out on that one too.

What do you think?

Google personalizing results is nothing new, as anyone who follows the industry knows, though I’m not sure how common this knowledge is to the average user. I’m not sure how often the average user thinks about this or even cares, to be honest.

Earlier this year, Google updated its privacy policy to consolidate numerous policies from its various products into one that can cover most of them, and enable the company to use data from service to service so that it can better personalize the user experience. This is, in fact, something that is even still causing drama in Europe. The EU is expected to tell Google it can’t do this on Tuesday, though it’s been doing it for months.

Google has not hidden from any of this, however, and maintains that a personalized experience is a better experience, and many would likely agree.

DuckDuckGo makes the point that Google is still personalizing searches even for signed out users, and says it had 131 who weren’t signed into Google perfrom searches for three different political queries (abortion, gun control and Obama), with a “wide variance” in resulting links, as it’s put in a Talking Points Memo article on the study.

In other DuckDuckGo news, the search engine has reportedly added “zero click” info from Zanran to its search results.

Business Insider obtained a summary/outline of what was discussed from sources the publication declined to name because they “want to keep people employed”. These sources reportedly said that Mayer shared non-specific plans to “acqui-hire” small companies for engineering talent to build products for Yahoo (as opposed to buying companies for their existing products).

The company is reportedly striving to become something users use every day, to do more of what the company is good at (and less of what it is not), to be partner-friendly, to be strong in mobile by 2015, and to move faster (giving employees more deadlines and resources). One important point from the outline is that Yahoo will only give the green light to products that can scale to 100 million users or $100 million in revenue.

That part about being partner-friendly is interesting in light of comments made by Google’s Eric Schmidt this week. He reportedly expressed interest in a partnership with Yahoo, though it’s hard to say that anything will come of this, as the two companies have tried to partner in the past, but had to pull the plug due to regulators. In other words, it’s obvious that Google would want to partner with Yahoo, but getting a partnership done is a different story. Still, it’s interesting that he would even say such a thing, especially considering that Yahoos now in the hands of a longtime Googler. I wonder what Microsoft thinks about it.

Kara Swisher at All Things D also provided an account of Mayer’s talk, which pretty much mirrors Business Insider’s, but she also notes that search and email were not discussed much.

On Tuesday, Yahoo announced the appointment of Ken Goldman to the CFO role.

Either way, one thing seems clear. To users of Google Glass, Google is going to be more up close and personal than ever before. That not only means Google pushing things in front of your eye, but potentially also users sending things back to Google.

What do you think about Google Glass? Do you want Google seeing what you see? Let us know in the comments.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin reportedly posted a limited Google+ update to those who ordered the special “Explorer Edition” of Glass, which developers were able to do at Google I/O last month. He included the above image, and said:

I wanted to share this photo with you that I took on a drive in Montana. I was testing a new mode of Glass which automatically takes a picture every 10 seconds without any distraction or disruption. Afterwards, I checked Instant Upload to see how the images had turned out and this one really caught my eye – I love the composition of the landscape mixed with sunlight and the beauty of the sky. I never would have captured this moment without Glass.

Think about that for a second. You’re wearing Google Glass, and Google is able to take pictures rapidly (who’s to say that can’t get it down to even less time than 10 seconds), and they’re instantly uploaded to Google’s servers. This is effectively Google storing the world as seen through your eyes.

Presumably, users would have to enable this functionality, just as they do with instant upload for Google+ on their mobile devices, but this could creep out some of those more worried about privacy. On the other hand, I’m not sure how many, who are that worried about privacy, will be willing to put Google on their faces to begin with.

The feature could have some pretty powerful ramifications though. Consider the possibilities that Google could come up with. For example, imagine if Google combined the technology with its search by image technology, and/or Knowledge Graph. You could be walking down the street getting all kinds of information in near realtime about the area you’re in, based on the photos that have been uploaded in the background from your field of vision, and Google’s search index matching the imagery with relevant information, places, maps, etc.

Google wants to get to know your every day routines with Google Now. I can’t imagine what kind of patterns Google would be able to piece together by simply seeing the world through your eyes. That could lead to the kind of personalization that we’ve never seen before.

Just in case you haven’t paid attention to Google Glass, you might want to start with these two videos. The first is just the initial promo concept video. The second one is real.

Check out our extensive Project Glass coverage here.

Do you like the idea of instantly uploading the things you see? Tell us what you think in the comments.

The page begins with the promo video we looked at previously:

“Google Now gets you just the right information at just the right time,” Google says on the page. “It tells you today’s weather before you start your day, how much traffic to expect before you leave for work, when the next train will arrive as you’re standing on the platform, or your favorite team’s score while they’re playing. And the best part? All of this happens automatically. Cards appear throughout the day at the moment you need them.”

Luckily, Google provides a small look at those cards on the landing page. Perhaps more interestingly, Google tells us what data it uses for each one. Google Now is kicking off with 10 cards. These are for:

1. Traffic (Shown based on current location, location history and Web History)

2. Public Transit (Only shown if location services enabled)

3. Next Appointment (Shown based on synced calendars and current location)

4. Flights (Only shown if location services and Web History enabled)

5. Sports (Shown based on Web History)

6. Places (Only shown if location services enabled)

7. Weather (Only shown if location services enabled)

8. Translation (Only shown if location services enabled)

9. Currency (Only shown if location services enabled)

10. Time At Home (Only shown if location services enabled)

With the traffic card, Google Now will let users see traffic conditions and alternate routes before you go to work. It also shows traffic to your next “likely destination”. The Public Transit card, shows when you’re near a bus stop or subway station, and what buses and trains are next. The Next Appointment card checks traffic so you know how long it will take to get there, and gives you notifications for when you should leave. The Flights card keeps you up to date on flight status, like when there are delays (and presumably cancelations), and gives you traffic conditions to the airport, for flights you’ve recently searched for.

The Sports card updates you on what Google thinks are your favorite sports times, based on search history, and gives you live scores and upcoming games. You can also buy tickets from the card.

The Places card suggests nearby restaurants, bars, and other places of interest. Users can jump to Google Maps for more info, get reviews, and make reservations.

The Weather card is pretty self-explanatory, but it shows weather for your current location, as well as work.

The Translation card translates words, the Currency card lets you quickly check local conversion rates, and the Time At Home card simply lets you know what time it is at home when you’re traveling.

Google Now, so far, appears to be largely about making travel more convenient, but Google says it will be adding more cards. It will be interesting to see what they come up with.

What cards would you like to see?

“These tailored suggestions are based on accounts followed by other Twitter users and visits to websites in the Twitter ecosystem,” explains Twitter’s Growth and International Director, Othman Laraki. “We receive visit information when sites have integrated Twitter buttons or widgets, similar to what many other web companies — including LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube — do when they’re integrated into websites. By recognizing which accounts are frequently followed by people who visit popular sites, we can recommend those accounts to others who have visited those sites within the last ten days.”

Apparently this is only the first in a series of experiments Twitter intends to run.

Twitter will show new users a list of suggested accounts on one side of the screen, and a timeline of tweets from those accounts on the other:

For current users, the experiment comes in the “Who to Follow” section:

If you don’t want Twitter to track your habits to personalize your suggestions, you can turn the feature off.

“As the Federal Trade Commission’s CTO, Ed Felten, mentioned earlier today, we support Do Not Track (DNT), which is reflected in our privacy policy as one of the ways you can indicate your preference,” says Laraki. “If you have DNT enabled in your browser settings, we will not collect the information that enables this feature, so you won’t see any tailored suggestions. We hope that our support of DNT highlights its importance as a privacy tool for consumers and creates even more interest and wider adoption across the web.”

More on Twitter and DNT here.

Earlier this week, Twitter announced that it would be sending out personalized emails with summaries from your Twitter timeline.

“I see a future where deeply personal digital experiences are easy to discover, delightful to consume, and effortless to share,” he says. “If done right, it will transform the way people use the Web. When I say ‘deep personalization,’ I don’t just mean some preference controls; I mean content that is so timely, relevant and personal that it actually adds meaning to your life.”

While he doesn’t actually talk about it in the post, Yahoo recently revealed a new personalization engine for delivering its content to users, called Content Optimization and Relevance Engine or C.O.R.E.

“Every hour C.O.R.E. processes 1.2 terrabytes of data in order to learn how a user’s behaviors and interests influence the likelihood of clicking on a specific article,” the Yahoo spokesperson told us last month. “And, every day, C.O.R.E. personalizes 2.2 billion pieces of content for Yahoo! users.”

“Since optimizing with C.O.R.E., Yahoo!’s Homepage click-through rate has increased 300%,” she said at the time. “Yahoo!’s personalization approach is a clever mix of scientific algorithms and human judgment, as editors have control to override C.O.R.E. at any time, to ensure certain stories are seen. Initially developed within Yahoo! Labs, C.O.R.E. has become a vital tool used throughout the day by editors across the company to bring our users personalized news, first.”

We can’t be sure if this is the main driving force of what Yahoo is considering “the next web,” but my guess is that it’s a key element. Of course, it’s not as if personalization of content is really a new thing, let alone the next thing. In fact, Irving has been singing a similar tune for quite some time. Here’s a video from 2010 where he’s talking about making the web personal:

Still, personalization of content can still get better, and that appears to be a primary focus for Yahoo.

“In future, I see a Web that acts on my behalf, one that finds content and connections for me and presents it to me in context—aware of my location, my activity, my social situation, my economics and my most timely considerations,” says Irving. “I see a Web where trust and transparency are the price of entry for publishers and technology providers, and where relationships are understood and cherished—on both sides of the connection.”

“If the technology economic model is done right, the best content will just come to me, and it will be as diverse and nuanced as I am—and as you are,” he says. “It’s not about vague categories of interest—cars, sports, technology, advertising, whatever. It’s about just the content I’d go out to find if I had the time and resources do it manually. It’s down there in the tail of the Web. And, even more so, it’s down in the torso of the Web—where there are economics at play, albeit a model that is mostly broken.”

He says that there’s “no question” that the web will become deeply personal, and that it’s just a matter of who makes it happen. He seems to think Yahoo has a shot at being the one, or at least a major contributor. And that might in fact be the case. As I write this (at about 12:15 EST), Yahoo has already had nearly 60 million homepage views for the day.

There are a lot of other companies contributing to the personalization of content consumption. Yahoo may very well be the gateway to a lot of it, but the social efforts of companies like Google, Facebook and others are already driving this to a huge extent.

Yahoo is undergoing a major transformation. Will it work? Who knows?

Yahoo is 17 years old. Where will it be in another 17 years? What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

Another example would be a new system Groupon is reportedly testing, which would give users more control over the types of deals they receive. According to Bloomberg, which interviewed CEO Andrew Mason, some users are already seeing the new system in action. It lets users “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” deals that Groupon shows them, so that Groupon can learn more about the person’s preferences, and serve them more relevant deals.

This is really the kind of thing we’re seeing from more and more web-based services – personalized recommendations. Think Pandora. You thumb up the tracks you like, and thumb down the ones you don’t, so that the service can deliver you a more relevant and enjoyable experience moving forward. It makes a great deal of sense.

However, this kind of personalization also presents the “filter bubble” issue, which basically boils down to the fact that we’re shutting ourselves off from things that are outside of our comfort zone, and we’re trusting algorithms to abide by our actual tastes. How do you know, for example, that a song you gave a thumbs down on Pandora didn’t lead to Pandora keeping your from hearing another song that you would have really liked, just because some part of its algorithm associated that song with the song you didn’t like? This can be an even bigger issue when you start thinking about news and information. News sites and social media services also engage in this kind of content delivery.

With a deals service like Groupon, however, there is not a lot of apparent risk. At worst, you will miss out on a deal that you may have taken advantage of. At least you’ll probably never know you missed it. This could be a small price to pay for having more deals come your way that actually are relevant to you (assuming Groupon’s algrorithm does its job right).

Either way, Groupon’s new system simply highlights the fact that we are increasingly finding ourselves in a more personalized world. For better or for worse.

This isn’t the first foray into personalization, we’ve seen from Groupon, of course. Just a few months ago, they launched a new type of personalization deal with its Deal Types and Places offering.

Over at the Google Chrome Blog, the stable release of Sign in to Google was announced, and while the personalization features it introduces may seem minor, to those who don’t like working in different environments, getting used to someone else’s browser setup won’t be an issue. As the post indicates, the Chrome sign in allows users to “take your Chrome stuff with you, so you can always have your personal Chrome experience on all of your devices.”

The concept is simple, with a Google Chrome account activated on one device and you change something on the current device’s setup — that is, add a bookmark — the change is reflected on all other Chrome-enabled devices, provided the user is signed in when the change was made.

The Chrome sign in works if there’s a shared computer involved as well. Google’s post explains:

With today’s Stable channel release, you can now add new users to Chrome. Adding new users lets you each have your own personal Chrome experience, and lets you each sign in to Chrome to sync your stuff. To add a new user to Chrome, go to Options (Preferences on a Mac), click “Personal Stuff,” and click “Add new user.” Check out our latest Beta blog post for a few quick tips.

The steps for adding a new user are as follows:

1. Click the wrench icon on the browser toolbar.
2. Select Options (Preferences on Mac and Linux).
3. Click Personal Stuff.
4. In the “Users” section, click Add new user.
5. A new window for the user appears, with a special icon for the user in the top corner. Here, you can sign in to Chrome with a Google Account to associate the account with the user. Once signed in, all the bookmarks, apps, extensions, theme, and browser settings for the user will be synced to the account.

There’s also a video of the Sign in to Chrome in action:

Does this level of personalization apply to you? Is it a feature you could see yourself using? Let us know what you think.